


Empress of the Exegol

by galere



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Exegol, Final fight, different ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:22:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23308297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galere/pseuds/galere
Summary: The spirits of the Force give advice to Rey Palpatine after her companion, the redeemed Ben Solo, is cast into a chasm like the Emperor before her.
Kudos: 6





	Empress of the Exegol

The Emperor, no longer a ghastly shade of a man, cackled as he shrugged off the contraption keeping him standing. The Force rippled and broke around him. “Why, granddaughter, you have given me a worthy gift! No longer will I have a legacy, nor will I be a legend! I will be a dark God! Death has been defeated. I will rule over the bones of the Jedi. Thank you, Rey Palpatine, for your sacrifice. I will grant you the mercy of death.”

Rey palmed her lightsabers, the Force screaming at her, and she calmed her nerves before diving into that void. The Force gathered around her, a rising mist coalescing into the spirit of the people who surrounded Emperor Palpatine and Rey. The darkness of the arena bursted into shades of sky and sea and life. A chorus of gapes and cheers broke out from their audiences of dark siders. 

Anakin Skywalker calling out, “Rey… bring balance to the Force.”

Leia Skywalker urging her forward.

Yoda encouraging her to feel the Force, and she felt herself grip the Force not unlike a weapon, mayhap a friend though.

Obi-Wan whispering with a hint of a smile, “Strike me down, Darth…”

Qui-gon saying, “We are all behind you, Rey.” 

“The Force will always be with you. Always,” said that humbled voice of Luke Skywalker. She remembered his cynicism, his lack of trust in the Force last they met, and yet he was here. 

And so many more voices, a cacophony of support and strength and wisdom that lifted her spirits and her body and she rose from the ground by force of will.

The ghosts spoke all at once, and the calm she had sought in the forest so long ago came to her at once with the whisper of a thousand lives saying there is no death, there is only the Force. 

She felt herself ignite the blades. “And I am all the Jedi.”

The Sith sneered, hand outstretched for something in the crowd. “Foolish girl. You are one Jedi surrounded by the failures of all other Jedi. You shall lose.”

One voice cut through the rest. Strong and righteous with the power of the Force, the remnants of Obi-Wan spoke words long lost to the wind in a new order. “You can’t win. We have become more powerful than the Sith could have ever imagined.”

Those weren’t the words that Rey would have used, but they were familiar and comforting from a friend of the Force. 

Behind you, the voices warned her as one and the Force guided her to step aside as a crackling red blade soared through where she once stood defiant. Palpatine chuckled.

“Perhaps you were a worthy successor. I can feel your anger brimming in the force. Unleash it upon me, child. Let me educate you!” The Emperor used the Force on the blade with quick and wide sweeping strikes and cackled as Rey was forced back. 

Rey deflected and dodged, listening to the whispers of Jedi past and to the urges of the Force. Eventually, the blade thrust in towards her. She side stepped, her back directly to the Emperor when the Force told her up and back. She flipped over the Force lighting and the Emperor, and took the opportunity to swipe at the Sith lord with one of her own blades.

The Emperor shrieked and brought his own blade to his hand to parry it. 

Rey landed at the foot of the throne.

Laughing, Darth Sidious turned off his blade and hid it within his robes. “Listen,” he said with a grin. “Not to the Force or to your dead order. Listen to your people. Unleash your anger. Exterminate me. Use your powers to cast me down and take this throne. If you cannot you shall join me, and serve my rule, girl.” 

The ghosts of the past silenced themselves, and Rey heard the Sith peoples chanting in foreign languages. It angered her that these people would fell themselves to such a master of hate. 

Anakin Skywalker chided her simply and softly, “No, Rey.” 

And the calm came over her again. She would learn from the past. Starting with this moment. The Emperor was too powerful to live, and these people were taken in his thrall. 

“Use the Force, you will,” said Master Yoda. “Show you, I will.”

And then through some trick of the Force, she saw a Yoda steal Force from Palpatine decades ago. Yoda had lost faith in the Force, and hadn’t been able to contain it. Rey could feel the Force deeply. She would contain Palpatine’s Force. 

“Watch, girl, as I destroy your friends. I am the master of the Force!” Then the Emperor threw his hands up in the air, and the Force raged with power and destruction by electrifying the entirety of the space above the planet. It spread through the atmosphere, ship to ship like a plague. Ships suddenly began to fall.

Rey felt only calm. They would rise when she was done. 

Rey said, “You aren’t anything to me, and you aren’t a god.”

And like before, Rey used the Force to stop the ships in motion and she felt the Force ache to be used. Just like when she destroyed that First Order prison transport. She didn’t release it in frustration and anger and despair, this time she let her hope for a better future grab a hold of the Force lightning and all the hate, all of the Emperor’s hate and she brought it into her. 

The Emperor’s eyes widened as he saw the lightning arc towards her, the blue lightning and essence fading into Rey’s hands and being so much so that she glowed with Force. The lightning she couldn’t hold crackled around her and the Force shielded any remnants that might have burned her. 

“Rey, let go.” Ben’s voice said. She looked over her shoulder and saw him among the ghosts, and she felt herself slip and she wished she had fallen instead of him. Rey wished it had been her that had been Force pushed into that abyss because he had just returned from darkness and he did deserve to die in it. “Rey! Focus on the Force. Release all of that power and hate into the Force.”

“No!” The Emperor snarled, face drawn in fury and rage. He poured more of himself into the lightning and Rey found herself containing more and more pure hate. “You shall not! I will burn you and this planet to ashes. I am power, and power is the law of the universe.”

“Give the hate to the Force. Please Rey. Learn from it and let it go. This anger is all in the past, let it go, please. It will kill you if you don’t.” Ben was pleading. Rey remembered pleading, begging, swearing that Ben would turn and he had. She was convinced then that she knew best. 

She would trust Ben, and she began to let the Force lightning go, trickle by trickle. It fell in sparks around her, burning the ghosts and ground around her. They began to whisper goodbyes, and she felt overwhelmed. 

“Let the past die, kill it if you have to.” She remembered those words, or maybe Ben was saying them now. She felt memories of the Jedi filter in and out of her mind like that vision the old Master Yoda had given her. The Force burned around her as Palpatine poured more of himself, his Force, into his attack until abruptly the attack ceased and the Force ghosts around her were all gone. Dead. Ben was still here. The last of the past. 

The Emperor slumped to his knees. Hoarsely, he hissed. “Impossible. You’ve stolen it from me. You’ve taken it from me.”

The Emperor drew his lightsaber from his robe, ignited and threw it in a fluid motion. Rey stared at the blade as it arced toward her. She couldn’t feel it or the Emperor in the Force. She reached out, trusting in the Force to stop the blade and it continued unimpeded. She felt lost, these powers that she had finally learned to believe in were now gone. Stripped away from her own actions. 

Ben reached out and stopped it with the Force. 

She hadn’t felt Ben either, only the whirlpool of Force and power earlier. She had felt all those in the Force too, all those Jedi long gone. Leia and Luke were gone. She had seen them fade from existence under the sparks of fury. They had smiled as they as been burned from the Force. So many others had too. There was nothing left.

“You’ll have to come and get me, I think.” Ben said before he disappeared and the lightsaber clattered to the ground.

The Emperor screamed and raged and struggled to stand. He found he could only collapse to the ground, impotent and weak. Then the most powerful man in the universe wept as he realized that he was no longer the shadow that blanketed the known universe. 

Rey felt the calm flee. She stumbled and sat on the ground for a moment, silence filling the air. The battle in space continued, the fleet of the Final Order systematically being destroyed as they rose completely undefended. Then the audience, the theatre of Sith roared their approval. They chanted words in the Sith language-and they said her name. Rey found a second wind as she bolted up towards the hole. 

The voices were low, gravelly, and pleased. “Oxth loc. Kali opni. Erte lop guras minik Rey Palpatine.”

They had to get off Exegol. She called down the chasm, “Ben?!”

His name echoed and echoed further, like waves lapping at the shore. She heard nothing below and tried to call for him again. She concentrated, feeling for his presence and found the planet vibrant and heavy in the Force. He was muddled like everything else on the planet. 

How had Ben found her? She was exhausted and scared, and that would be okay if there was a way off the planet before the Sith flooded the amphitheatre floor to raise her as some sort of Dark Empress.

She called out in the Force and found only silence. 

Rey swore. Something she had picked up from Leia while she had been training. Rey hadn’t expected the General to have such a wide variety of curses, but Leia had smiled and waved it away as a perk of marrying a smuggler. 

She stumbled her way to the chasm and Ben heaved himself over the lip, panting. Rey smiled. For once today, something had gone right. “Ben?”

“Rey,” he said breathlessly. Either he was exhausted or she truly had taken his breath away by simply being here. “Where’s the Emperor?” 

“Dead and gone. He was destroyed and removed from the Force entirely.” 

Ben fidgeted and shifted his feet. “That’s good. Glad to hear it. I should leave before your friends come planetside, and before those cultists kill us.” 

Rey glanced over at the amphitheatre, hooded and dark figures were rushing through the exits, feet and chants shaking the very structure. Then she glanced at Ben, his dark hair and serious demeanor sweaty and pale. “You should meet them. My friends, not the dark siders I mean.”

Ben snorted and wiped his brow. “They’d try to kill me before you could calm them down, and even if your friends somehow forgive me there’s no way the rest of the Rebellion would. Face it, Rey. This is where we part.”

Rey frowned. “For now. You won’t turn me away when I reach out with the Force?”

The question was as much a question as an order, she wasn’t going to let Ben come back from the dark side only to fall to the wayside, forgotten and alone. 

Ben shrugged, and he pointed over to the feet of the amphitheater where the cultists were rushing from the tunnels toward them. “Sure, that’s a problem though. I’ll listen if you call, which isn’t a problem. Run with me to my ship? I can drop you off on one of the Rebel ships if you have comm codes.” 

The journey to the ship, a sleek and damaged fighter, was uneventful. Rey saw bodies of darksiders and Knights of Ren as they passed. They were in the atmosphere long before the dark side cultists reached them, their last chants changing to the shrieking and roaring of her name as they flew away. 

The voices lingered in Rey’s mind, the cultist and Sidious. 

Sidious had hidden for years on this planet, and he had raised the greatest army and fleet hidden from the rest of the galaxy. No one had known he still lived. And now he was gone. Rey had felt him die in form and the Force, but still, there was a lingering doubt, a small possibility that Sidious had evaded death again. She shivered at the thought. 

They would have unmade her. 

“Rey?” Her attention snapped to Ben’s hand hovered over the comm button and scanned her face with concern. “The comm code?”

“Oh. Sorry. Just glad we made it off Exegol. Let me.” Rey brushed aside his hand and toggled the button and gave her code to the operator. 

There was a pause before a voice crackled over the comm. “This is Admiral Orficus, you have Rey’s comm code, but we had intel that she had no ship on Exegol. Explain.”

Ben looked to her with a raised brow. “Well? You did most of the work. You tell the story.” 

Rey smiled. Then she winked. “I made a friend on Exegol, and he gave me a lift. I think he’d make for a great rebel.”


End file.
